$50M will help Kabbage expand its small-business loan program

A Kabbage loan may be a better option than a bank loan — and the lender is now flush with new cash.

The financial services startup today announced that it’s raised a $50 million funding round. This new investment comes one month after Kabbage closed a $270 million credit faculty, which it’s using to loan more money to small businesses and online merchants.

Kabbage analyzes a substantial amount of data when determining business loan sizes and rates. A service primarily for online sellers, Kabbage plugs into services like Quickbooks, Sage, PayPal, Square, and many more to consider financials and sales history when calculating a potential borrowers’ creditworthiness. Kabbage loans top out at $100,000.

Although Kabbage now supports offline businesses, its bread and butter is online merchants, which are often underserved by banks. Online sellers also tend to produce more (and more easily accessible) data. With all that data, Kabbage can reject or approve a claim within minutes, because it automates the entire process.

Kabbage customers typically use the loans to buy inventory for their e-commerce efforts, whether they’re selling on established platforms like Amazon and Etsy or on their own online stores.

SoftBank Capital led Kabbage’s $50 million funding round, which also saw contributions from new investors TCW/Craton and Lumia Capital.

“Kabbage is using data and technology in a highly innovative way to transform the entire small business financing sector,” Steve Murray, partner at SoftBank Capital, said in a statement. “It is the kind of game-changing opportunity in which SoftBank likes to invest.”

Since Kabbage’s May 2011 launch, it’s loaned over $250 million to businesses, according to the company. It expects to double that figure by the end of the year.

Kabbage will use its new funds to continue product development — it’s looking to broaden its financial offerings with different loan terms and structures — and expand into new geographic territories. It’s already active in the U.S. and U.K., and it’s looking to launch in Canada and parts of Asia.

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Kabbage is a financial and data technology company that pioneered the use of unique yet compelling data sources to radically change the way small businesses obtain capital. In just two years, Kabbage has become the number one online pr... read more »